There are few rituals more powerful in the life of a nation than the singing of its national anthem. In two short verses, the Australian national anthem binds history, sacrifice, freedom and shared destiny. When a community sings the anthem, it energises and unites us. When children stand and sing it together, they are being initiated into citizenship.
Recently, the Northern Territory’s education minister has mandated that all public schools play and sing the Australian national anthem at assemblies and special events. Both verses, in English. Students are expected to stand and learn what it means to be Australian. The minister said children had ‘been deprived of feeling proud to be Australian’. The policy also includes an update to the school curriculum, in order for students to learn about the symbols of Australian identity and national pride.
Hooray! Celebrating Australia Day, our national symbols and our national anthem is hugely refreshing. It’s great for our country and great for our psyche. And that is precisely why these symbols and rituals are under determined attack.
Activist providers of free educational material widely used in Australian classrooms suggest students sit for the national anthem and share their protest on social media for greater impact. They teach that national symbols are oppressive. That Australia’s story is not one of extraordinary achievement, but an unending and intergenerational crime scene.
The new Victorian treaty mandates ‘truth-telling’ in classrooms to children as young as five, embedding guilt, grievance, and victimhood, with significant doses of misinformation and selective memory.
‘Truth’ requires us to tell the story of the whole – not just conflict and injustice, but the extraordinary civilisation that has emerged on this land, with the rule of law, equality before the law, democratic institutions, free speech, women’s rights, religious liberty, prosperity, and social mobility. None of these were inevitable. None existed in pre-colonial Australia. All arrived with Western Civilisation, transported, imperfectly but decisively, by British settlement.
To deny this is historical illiteracy and civic sabotage. It doesn’t teach children critical thinking, but rather cultural alienation.
Ironically, the same activists who rail endlessly about ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ fail to recognise that the first and greatest act of Australian DEI arrived with the First Fleet itself. The First Fleet brought new foods. New music. Diversity in skin colour, beliefs, ways of doing things. A chaotic, battered collection of broken men and women of different classes were offered new opportunity. People of different creeds, ethnicities, abilities and backgrounds – convicts and guards, sailors and officers, Irish, English, Scottish, African, free and unfree – were thrown together, bringing diversity to the existing inhabitants under one, immersive and emerging civic order.
The First Fleet was the original diverse cohort. It was the original inclusion project.
The modern DEI industry, by contrast, does not unite. It fragments. It teaches children to see themselves first as members of grievance categories, not as Australians. It replaces gratitude with resentment, inheritance with accusation, and common culture with perpetual protest.
A nation that teaches its children to be ashamed of its foundations and withhold respect from its own symbols is a nation unteaching them how to belong, and to feel homeless in their own country.
Shared symbols are integral to a free society; once they are eroded, what remains is not unity, but fragmentation.
Compulsory standing and singing of the national anthem in schools – at least weekly – is formative. It says you belong to something larger than yourself. You are the inheritor of a civilisation built on law, freedom and sacrifice. You did not create it, but you are responsible for carrying it forward.
And you are one of the luckiest people on earth to be able to do so.
Colleen Harkin is the National Manager of the Institute of Public Affairs’ Schools Program
